Ghetto Life 101

CLARENCE PAGE Chicago Tribn

Teens, Radio Reporting Fleshed Out Into Compelling Book

CHICAGO - — While most of the country was visiting Mars, thanks to a robot space probe, I was visiting the ghetto, thanks to a couple of clever young fellows with tape recorders.

LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman live in Chicago, but they could be kids in the low-income, crime-plagued neighborhoods of any American city.

Kids, that is, who also have tape recorders.

Jones and Newman were 13 years old when they were recommended to David Isay, an award-winning producer for National Public Radio. Isay was looking for two bright low-income inner-city kids who do with tape recorders what Alex Kotlowitz did with his award-winning best seller, "There Are No Children Here."

Kotlowitz introduced his readers to two brothers growing up in Chicago's crime-plagued Henry Horner Homes, a high-rise public housing development near the United Center arena that Michael Jordan helped make famous.

Jones and Newman live in the Ida B. Wells homes, a development on Chicago's South Side that became infamous when a 5-year-old Eric Morse was dropped to his death from a high-rise by two other boys, age 10 and 11.

With coaching from Isay, Jones and Newman reported two series that aired on NPR, "Ghetto Life 101" in 1993, and "Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse," which aired last year. Both received national awards, including the Peabody Award, one of broadcast journalism's highest honors, and national profiles, including one recently on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Not bad for a couple of kids. The best way I can describe the impact of their reporting is "driveway stories."That means they were so compelling that - when I heard the first one while driving home from work - I sat in my car in my driveway with my radio still turned on until I had heard every last word of it.

Now those driveway stories, fleshed out with additional interviews that were not aired, have been compiled in a book, "Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago," illustrated with photos by John Brooks, who also grew up in Chicago public housing.

Through interviews with kids, parents, neighbors, relatives, survivors, gang members, a drug dealer and their principal, Jones and Newman and their tape recorders give us sound pictures as vivid as the images sent back by the Sojourner on Mars, that sound as good - or as bad - as being there.

Most striking is the violence that colors their lives between long stretches of boredom.

Yearning for structure, they and their young friends find things to do that include riding the buses for recreation, chasing little snakes in vacant lots that have been reclaimed by the prairies and, with obvious contempt for the faceless "suburbanites," throwing rocks at cars on the Dan Ryan Expressway.

Such candor about such a dangerous, threatening activity reveals kids who are sitting on the brink of more serious crimes, if no one gives them a future to believe in.

One of their drug-dealing friends says bluntly, "I ain't gonna be alive in 10 years because I'll be selling my drugs and they're gonna pop my a-."

But the reader is also intrigued by the adult role models surrounding Jones and Newman, good and bad. Their principal, Margaret Tolson, sounds like a patient, understanding woman who must be parent and instructor to kids who have too little of either.

Newman interviews his absentee father in a hospital bed, in the process of drinking himself to death, deep in denial about what he has done or hasn't done for his children.

Jones, who never has known his father, interviews his mother, who has been treated for mental illness, and grandmother, who took him and his sisters in rather than have the state send them to foster homes.

Through Jones and Newman's aggressive questioning we get a portrait of some people who struggle mightily and others who simply give up, black people whose circumstances left them behind while two-thirds of black America is in poverty despite the civil rights and anti-poverty reforms of the 1960s.

The best story in this book is the two boys themselves. Despite all the violence and despair around them, they show a relentless energy and optimism. The energy seems to come from the fact that somebody, at last, wants to hear their story. The optimism seems to come from the way their project and its rewards have given them a glimpse of a brighter future.